Chapter 5
Cordelia stepped down off the train onto the platform at Fox Hollow and saw Rufus Barclay before she had even let go of the rail.
He stood at the far end of the boards with his hat in his hand and a brown horse hitched behind him. He saw her almost the same second she saw him, lifted the hand with the hat in it, and started forward.
Everything is going to be all right. She hadn't expected to think it today.
Jacqueline had said goodbye at Liddleton two days past with a squeeze of her hand and a "He'll be a tall, steady one, mark me," and Cordelia had laughed and waved and then watched the country flatten out toward Fox Hollow with her stomach in a knot.
The knot hadn't loosened until now. It loosened as he crossed the platform toward her.
"Miss King.”
He said it calmly, in a warm voice.
"Mr. Barclay.”
She said it in a nervous, uneven voice she would very much have liked to have another try at.
He stopped a polite step from her. His eyes were grey, greyer than the daguerreotype had prepared her for, and the lines at the corners of them were the lines of a man who had spent years looking at distances in strong light.
They crinkled before his mouth moved. Kindness sat in his smile before anything else did, and it occupied a space in her chest she hadn't known was empty.
"I'm very glad to meet you," he said. "I hope the train wasn't too much."
"I survived it." She managed a smile of her own. "A very fine woman shared a sandwich with me."
"That's a good omen. What kind?”
“Cheese and apple.”
She liked that he’d asked. His voice matched the letters, round and unhurried, and her shoulders came down half an inch at the sound of it.
He took her valise. He did not offer his arm, which she approved of, a frontier propriety she had been told about and not been sure she would see in practice.
They started down the platform together toward the buggy, and the boards rang under his boots, and for a few steps she allowed herself to think only about the sound of her own arrival.
His hand closed sure over the valise handle as he lifted it from hers, and the contact was brief, but his fingers grazed hers.
His stride matched hers, even and unhurried, and he stood tall beside her, the breadth of his shoulders against the pale sky.
The thought she had held back on the train came up anyway… that she had been right to come.
"Barclay."
A voice. From off the end of the platform. They both turned.
A man had come up. He was perhaps fifty, with a beard going grey at the chin and a working hand at his side and a face that had been arguing with somebody, internally, all the way over.
Cordelia did not know him. All at once she had stepped off the train into the middle of a conversation that had been happening for some days without her.
"Mr. Drew."
"Is this her?" He looked at Cordelia.
Her. As though she were freight come in on the same train.
Rufus cleared his throat. "This is Miss King. Miss King, this is Mr. Albert Drew. He has a hardware concern in town."
"Ma'am." Drew did not look at her. He looked at Rufus. "I was sorry to hear you wouldn't give the boy up this morning."
Rufus did not answer at once.
"I was sorry to be asked to," he said.
"That's town money."
"I am aware of what it is."
Cordelia kept her face still. Two men, a town's worth of argument compressed between them, and her trunk not yet off the platform.
"My brother's wages were in that box. The widow Calder's mortgage was in that box. Sippy will pay it back when he can, which is to say when he can find it, and he won't find it sitting in your bunkhouse."
"There's no money of Sippy's at my bunkhouse."
"You have the boy who has the money. Same thing, on the road."
"You don't know he has any money. You know he was seen running, which is also true of my brown horse in a thunderstorm, and I haven't yet accused her of robbery."
Drew's jaw worked. He looked, for the first time, at Cordelia.
"Ma'am. I'm sorry to do this your first hour off the train. Your man is harboring a thief. I wouldn't be a neighbor if I didn't say so to your face."
She made herself answer. It came out steady, which surprised her.
"Mr. Drew. I've only just stepped onto the platform. I don't know the boy, or your sheriff, or your store. I don’t know you. I won't contradict a neighbor on his first sentence, and I won't agree with one either. I'll hear what my Mr. Barclay tells me when we're out of the wind."
Drew looked at her another second. Then he looked at Rufus.
"Boone Keaton is a good young man," Rufus said.
"Until wrongdoing is proved against him, I will not hand him over.
If the sheriff brings me proof, he'll have him within the hour.
If a neighbor brings me a name and a grievance, I'll hand him a chair on my porch and a cup of coffee and we'll talk. We won't be doing this at the rail."
Drew looked as though he were going to say one more thing. He did not.
"You'll hear from us, Barclay."
"I believe it."
Drew walked off down the platform. Rufus set her valise down at the edge of the boards. He stood with his hand at his back for one breath, and then he took the valise up again and turned to her.
"I'm sorry," he said. "That wasn't the way I'd wanted to begin this."
"You've nothing to apologize for."
He looked at her then with a searching look, as if he were waiting for the door at the back of her face to close.
She did not let it close. She had thought, very clearly, on the train, about what it would feel like to step off into a problem instead of a romance, and she had been ready for it.
She was not as ready as she had thought. She was, however, ready enough.
She thought of Alma. She thought of the bench inside the bars and the white-knuckled hands and the woman who had said I knew, plain and level, behind the bars. The word came back to her now with a sharp edge. Knew.
She did not know what Rufus knew. She did not know what Boone had done. She had been on this platform seven minutes. She would not turn her face away on seven minutes.
"Mr. Barclay," she said. "Help me up into your buggy. We’ll go home."
He looked at her. The guardedness in his face eased.
"Yes, ma'am."
He helped her up. He stowed the valise. He went around and climbed up beside her and clicked his tongue at the brown horse, and the buggy rolled out under the platform shadow into the long pale Fox Hollow afternoon.
Cordelia did not look back at Mr. Drew. She kept her eyes on the road.
He sat close on the narrow bench, his shoulder a hand's width from hers, and that hand's width was the loudest thing on the long pale road home.